As Dorothy Ko contends, there has been a deep-seated image of the victimized, passive and voiceless “feudal” women. As a May Fourth legacy, this image was on a larger part a combined product of an analytical confusion that confounds normative prescriptions with experienced realities, and of a lack of historical studies that examine women’s own views of their worlds (Ko, 1994). In 1957, Hu Wenkai 胡文楷’s Women’s Writings Through The Ages 歷代婦女著作考 revealed the unprecedented literary phenomenon of women’s writing during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The astounding repertory of about 4000 individual collections and anthologies of women’s poetry makes for a vast realm of opportunities for not only literary studies, but also cultural, social and historical explorations based on the true voices of the women writers.
In previous studies on women’s song lyrics, employing the concept of negotiation first introduced into this field by Maureen Robertson, scholars such as Grace Fong and Kang-i Sun Chang consider women writers’ appropriation of the masculine style a gesture of negotiation and of rejecting the male-constructed poetic feminine. However, Fong also observes that the majority of the women writers in actuality adopted the feminine style when they wrote song lyrics (Fong, 1995). This paper aims to show that some women writers, such as Ge Xiuying 葛秀英 (1773-1791), still managed to negotiate with the conventional boudoir poetics and to assert their subjectivities, even when they adopted the feminine style.